Nets at Every Angle

There is a sort of swaggering menace that characterizes many Circus Devils songs, and for its first half, "Nets at Every Angle" fits that profile perfectly. It's built on a base of skittering keyboards and churning guitar chords, and Robert Pollard's vocal is more boastful declaration than singing. As such, it feels indistinguishable from many other Circus Devils songs save for a short whistled line that serves as a chorus of sorts.

Then, two-thirds of the way in, all of that fades away, replaced by a quiet, heavily treated guitar line over which Pollard sings the song's title, his vocal heavily reverbed, his singing given the effect of a round. It's a cathartic release that makes the first part of the song resonate more effectively, and gives the song a unique identity.

Stars, Stripes and Crack Pipes

This may be the best song title Robert Pollard has come up with in a long time, and it fits the music created by the Tobias brothers, a slinky strut of a song that finds Pollard speaking the lyric more than singing it. And those lyrics include some great lines that sound like the voice-over from a grizzled gumshoe in a '40s private eye film:

"I need a new place to travel and a body that's not an impostor."

"Into a secret room with a mute pencil I dive."

"I could not survive the tyranny of that dimly lit, cracked, wallpaper skin."

Add to that the most menacing "whoahs" on record, and the result is one of the more successful Circus Devils experiments.

I-Razors

There are plenty of examples in Robert Pollard's collaborative work where Pollard has tried and failed to graft a vocal onto a contributed songbed. Things work fairly well, but it's clear that these are two distinct elements that don't quite mesh.

Given those occasional failings, it's important to note when Pollard knocks it out of the park. There are the easy collaborations like that with Tommy Keene, where Pollard's melodies are so effortless that they seem to have written themselves. Then there are the much more challenging collaborations where it seems as if Pollard's foil has issued a dare rather than offered a complementary composition.

Pretty much anything by Todd Tobias in the guise of Circus Devils qualifies for the second category. His angular songs often have no obvious throughline; their disjointed organization, dynamic swings and tempo shifts seem like purposefully constructed roadblocks for Pollard.

Undaunted, Pollard turns in something like the vocal for "I-Razors," wrestling the stumbling stew of menace to the ground and giving it something that, while not necessarily hummable, certainly keeps it from flying apart. He even embeds an honest-to-God hook with the oft-repeated line, "Take them and make them mine."

Listening to the song closely, trying to block out Pollard's vocal to hear what he heard the first time he cued this up, it becomes all the more impressive that he found these spots and was able to create something so organic sounding.